Screen Australia and the Canada Media Fund have today announced a CAD$800,000 incentive for creatives working in interactive digital mediums. Their definition is quite broad — it could mean an app, a game, an online format or even a virtual reality experience — as long as it has the potential to be truly innovative and even ‘mind-blowing’.
Canada and Australia have co-produced 56 films, animations and television projects since Screen Australia signed the treaty with Canada in 1990 (which includes The Saddle Club, of all things), and now they want to promote collaborations in more experimental formats as well. “With 50 film and television co-productions between Canada and Australia, it’s a natural fit to build on this relationship and create an incentive for interactive digital media coproduction,” says Valerie Creighton, President and CEO of CMF.
Screen Australia’s Investment Manager Mike Cowap had this to add:
The Canada-Australia Interactive Digital Media Incentive is designed to not only encourage creatives from each country to work together, but to facilitate the production of truly innovative and original narrative pieces. This Incentive is their chance to push the boundaries of how a story can be told in an interactive way, whether it is in an app, online, virtual reality or any other mind-blowing idea they can come up with. The hardest thing may be working with the time zone difference.
The maximum contribution for any funded project will be CAD$300,000 — which works out to around $316,000 AUD at current exchange rates– and the specific contributions of each country will be worked out for each project on a case by case basis. Projects will be evaluated and eventually selected by a team of representatives from both Australia and Canada.
So do you have a project in mind that would benefit from a little Canadian involvement and a lot of funding? The guidelines for applying for the Incentive will be up on the Screen Australia website from October 23, and submissions will be open from November 1 through to January 22, 2016.